When it comes to fundamental physical laws, these temporal aspects are made explicit through the natural articulation of primitivism and dispositionalism within the framework of the initial value formulation of physical theories. In this context, the ontological picture is that the spacetime distribution of particular facts is not primitive, but produced and determined by the initial conditions of the world together with the primitive fundamental laws or by the fundamental dispositional properties instantiated by the initial state of the world. This picture is made very explicit in [1]}, where he writes that, according to his primitivism, “the total state of the universe is, in a certain sense, derivative: it is the product of the operation of the laws on the initial state” (182).Throughout this section, Maudlin's primitivism (as exposed in [1]}, and more recently in [3]}) will often serve as an illustration, partly because it explicitly captures features that are common to other non-Humean conceptions of laws, and also because it has been articulated with fundamental physics in mind.
